Roundtable attendance

[jhankins]

Our RT attendance varies. Some months we'll have 80 or 90, others maybe 20-30.

 

Door prizes have helped. Local restaurants or gift cards from Wal*Mart -- having our OA chapter meeting at the same time... A Venturing Crew holding their meeting at RT and inviting other Crews and parents to participate...

 

We have over 1,000 registered leaders in my district, here's hoping in the next year our attendance can reach more than 10% or less!

[Lisabob]

If our council or district only allowed those who showed up to some day, fair, kick-off, or special RT to get the calendar of events for the coming year, then I imagine there would be few surprises when hardly anybody attended the rest of the council or district events for that year. Don't hand out a calendar and people just won't come. Seems like a backward way to do things, to me!

 

About RT attendance, I don't blame people for not going if there's not much value to the program. No matter what position you hold in scouting, one thing you probably didn't say when you volunteered was "oh goody, I'll have reason to attend a bunch of useless meetings!"

 

 

[moosetracker]

I got the count tonight that we had over 400 at the Kick-off.

 

Not that it was like this in past years, but they can now pull it off of the web site. Though it is more work for them. Most events are only district level.

 

This maybe wouldn't work with all Councils, but it works great for ours. So my hat is off to them for finding something that brings people in.

 

Now once you have their attention, you had better present some great stuff, or you wont get them back next year.

 

But, if you have a GREAT program, and a small carrot to dangle. You can usually get people to come.

[BadenP]

The problem is that unless there is something at the RT that a scouter feels they can not get anywhere else, and that they really need that something they still are not gonna come. There is a reason, IMHO, why the average attendance at RT nationwide is around 10%, they are way too structured, dispensing the same info that are in all the leader manuals, and there is little to no time set aside for fellowship and discussion about problems the leaders may be having in their units. This last point was the original focus of RT's and now it has erroded into a a monthly fact spewing session of the same information you can find on your council website, and who wants to waste an hour and a half in the evening listening to that dribble.

 

As far as training is concerned your time is too limited to really do an effective job with any formal training. RT should be a place a scouter can go to get help or information beyond BSA publications, and find a resource of people from whom they can get advice with problems or activities going on in their unit from other experienced scouters. Offering some kind of token reward will NOT get more people to RT.

[desertrat77]

To echo two of BadenP's points: token rewards (aka shiny objects) and BSA literature rehashs will not get folks to RT.

 

In a life full of meetings, and powerpoint death marches, RT is quite easy to scratch off the list.

 

Meeting organizers, bless them, feel safe by having every meeting structured from start to finish. There should be plenty of time for open forum discussion, and then old fashioned fellowship.

 

That said, facilitators must be firm but fair. RTs can easily be steered by the old timers into familiar ruts (griping about the recharting process as well as council/district intrigues). This stuff is enjoyed by a few but a turn off to anyone else. Gotta keep the dialogue fresh and worthwhile.

[Lisabob]

Maybe if RT resembled a good forum page, where somebody can pose a question and get feedback from a variety of viewpoints, then it would be more useful to a lot of folks. Gee. Kind of like our little forum here.

 

And yes, we have ruts and old-timers who like to get stuck in them. But by and large, if a person posts a question here, they get some darn good input to consider most of the time. I really wish RT were more like this. Then again, in small-ish communities, I'm not sure it could be replicated. One nice thing here is that we can talk about issues or problems without too much worry that everybody will know exactly who we are talking about.

[moosetracker]

Maybe that is one of the reasons our RT are more successful. We have the annoucements & the structure. But after the announcements you can go off to the rooms for structure, or you can stay in the school cafeteria where the annoucements were and just yak to this person or that person.

 

Lots of people shuffle off, lots of people stay and yak.

[eagle90]

Don't teach me how to tie a square knot or how to identify a tree. I can get that from the handbook. Don't talk to me like I'm a 12 year old Tenderfoot. Rather have a discussion with other leaders present:

Where did you go camping last month?

What was the campsite like, what's there to do there?

What do you do for fundraising?

Where are you going for High Adventure this year?

How's your recruiting going?

How do you promote advancement?

Etc etc etc

 

Make it a real roundtable discussion that can help units

 

Dale